Ever since I got my own computer and started watching movies, cartoons and anime, I’ve wanted to have a great collection, and back in the day the only way to do that was to save them on your computer hard drive and view them on that computer. Then I learned about the these really convenient little things called portable (external) HDDs, so I could store my media on that and then view it on a different device, and that worked great… at the time.

Ever since I got a new DSLR and lenses, I have been intrigued by the opportunities it has given me in terms of my photography. I have been trying out various angles, lighting, scenery (whenever I travel) and try get photos that would leave my viewers amazed. And I thought I was doing pretty well. But as with anything, there will always be someone who is better then you. Even though that sounds discouraging, I believe that its important to befriend that person and ask them to teach, to mentor you until you acquire skills similar to theirs.

That is exactly what I have done with my photography. First, my Singaporean friend Darrell showed me the ropes, taught me the basics of manual shooting. Then in Japan, our Turkish gaijin Burak showed me some tips and tricks with night photography, moving objects and just refined my skills overall. While I was away, my potato friend Seb learned a lot about photography and pretty much taught me how to post-process photos in Lightroom to make then even better. Now after starting my new job at WiseTech Global, I have met yet another person who has amazing skills, that I would love to learn – Anton. Please check out his photos on his website FotoForge and Facebook Page. He loves taking photos of the environment: landscapes, seascapes, buildings, anything. And he invited me to take photos of the sunrise at Maroubra beach. And as you can imagine, the views were stunning. Take a look:

And so I find myself in Kuala Lumpur International Airport, sitting at my gate, having waved another goodbye to my parents, on my way back to university and work life in Sydney. The holiday is over, even though it feels like it has only just begun.

Malaysia is a great country, with very calm and kind people, good food and interesting places. Over the pas week and a half we have explored KL and its surroundings, visited the new “capita” Putrajaya, and even went to good old port town Malaka. Oh did I mention we fed monkeys? We fed monkeys! All this before setting down in a beach resort on the tropical island Langkawi. We spent a good week in Langkawi just laying on the beach/by the pool, playing games of Uzhgorod style “Hungarian Joker” and shopping around the local boutiques.

Alas the holiday is over and now I must catch my flight back to my home down under. See you space cowboy.

You have probably heard about this case, but for those that haven’t: the FBI have ordered Apple to create a version of iOS that would allow the FBI to access a terrorists smartphone in hopes of finding some valuable clues to the case and possible links to other terrorists. What they affectively want is for Apple to compromise their own security “for this one case” and then “un-compromise” it again. Let that sink in.

For my family travels this year, we decided to head over to Malaysia. However, on the way there, I got a great opportunity to visit my friends in the small island-country-city – Singapore.

After arriving there and meeting up with my good buddies from urbanest – Wilmer and Darrel. I checked into the Ruck Sack Inn in Little India, which got refurbished recently, so it was a rather pleasant environment for me to stay for 2 night, plus it was cheap. We met up with Mr. Schumacher – Nian, and proceeded to a traditional Singaporean chilly crab restaurant and then drinks afterwards. Man, what can I say, the chilly crab was amazing, but it made me realise how bad I am at eating crab.

The next day was fully packed as well: Gardens by the Bay, walking around downtown and CBD, Funan Centre, Bay area at night and some great satays for dinner. And finally the last day was spent in Little India, Chinatown and just out and about the area, all the touristy stuff.

Huge thanks to Wilmer, Darrell and Nian for the warm welcome in the 30° hot Singapore. And now I am off to see my parents in Kuala Lumpur.

Today I would like to introduce you to a browser extension you never knew you would need, but will not be able to live without. Its called WikiWand and it will change the way you interact with WikipediA forever!

Basically whenever you open a wikipedia.com article, it will automatically style it with high res images, body margination, a great navigation pane on the left, and just general improvements all over. There is a shortcut for searching (ctrl twice), settings for text size/serif font, favourite language options and more. These additions might sound like not that big of a deal, but when combined together, they make for a much more refined wikipedia browsing experience.

So if you use wikipedia a lot, or even once in a while, I would highly recommend you get yourself this extension and enjoy a new way of wiki-ing.

As you all know, Blizzard has made a lot of great games in the past. Memorable titles such as Warcraft III, Diablo II, Starcraft and of course currently WoW have all been hugely successful in their genres. One of their latest games (well it came out in 2014) is Hearthstone. It is a collectable card game, where you fight one on one against opponents from all over the world. Hearthstone is based of the Warcraft universe, so for people who have played Warcraft III and/or WoW, the characters/minions/spells will be very familiar.

Like any other card game out there, you have a deck, which contains minions, spells, and weapons. Each hero has 30 health and your objective is to bring down the health of your opponent to 0. Its a lot of fun, and you gotta give props to blizzard for making a f2p game for the masses, that can be played on mobile and doesn’t require much skill in order to play. Of course if you want to reach legendary rank, then you need skill, luck and a whole heap of cards.

There has been a lot of stuff happening in my life recently – got a new job, moving to a new place, last semester of uni soon, started playing Hearthstone seriously, etc. So I decided it would be a great time to update my blog.

The main thing you will notice is the new theme! I call it りんごジュース (Apple Juice) because its orange and orange juice is delicious (I know that made no sense, but cool things never do). The colour scheme is once again lighter, now with more white and less orange; images are more prominent on posts, cause I really want to show off my great photos; the pages have been renamed and sections moved to more appropriate locations. This opened up potential for a new page which I call Timeline. I have yet to finish coding that page, so bare with me, as it is gonna be completely different from everything else, and thus requires much more time to put together. Also the sidebar is gone, it’s been retired in favour of a fixed top navigation bar. Decided to use a different font as well – PT Sans. (Why this one? Cause its Russian! Also, if you are wondering, Ringo is still around you just need to find her.